Sports: USA: Lacrosse popularity surprises, contends with baseball for ratings

As hi school athletes slip into their straps this spring, that's in the Greater Philadelphia area at least, they're as much likely to be dressing up for lacrosse as for baseball. In lacrosse, the costume is much more extraterrestrial, and total-helmetted, and (I would hope, from seeing it on TV in the land from which it hails) much more thoroly padded. In baseball, you can get hurt; but in lacrosse you are likely to get whammoed in most games. Still, in and around Philly and in more and more locales around the USA, lacrosse's popularity increases in popularity by leaps and bounds, especially in the hi-school jock demographic mentioned. And as a spectator sport, its rapidly growing fanship seems to have something to do with the attraction of slammo blasto video games. But for the players, What is the attraction, compared to baseball with which it shares the season? Surely, it has its roots in the same increase of participation in extreme sports, both in real life and on TV reality shows. As fewer and fewer young male adults can even meet a military recruiter in their hi schools, colleges, and universities, where large activist groups disdain any form of respect for the warrior motivated by patriotism at arms, it would seem the most hily libidic of these guys are looking around for a way of doing what they're seeing in the videosports and on TV. Lacrosse appeals to an instinctive drive toward physical risk, tho channelled, like other such powerful drives that find some form of social acceptance, into the rules and goals of a very demainding sport. Baseball appeals to something else, where its rules and manner of scoring points renders it "the gentleman's sport."


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